Blog

Where do you place the application inside the Docker image? In the past, when deploying Python/Django projects, we’d put them in /srv/django-projects/APPNAME on a (possibly shared) machine. The python-virtualenv that came with it, went into /srv/virtualenvs/APPNAME. Now that we’re dockerizing many projects, we don’t need the virtualenv (there is only one environment) and we don’t need the APPNAME either (there is only one application). So, where should we place the project?

After having gotten used to Unity on the Ubuntu desktop, with Ubuntu Artful it is time to say goodbye. When Ubuntu first added the Unity shell with just the sidebar with big buttons, in favor of the more traditional GNOME with its Windows 95 style interface, many were skeptical, me included. But removing the clutter was good, and I’ve happily worked with it for years. And you really don’t want to waste time tweaking your desktop away from the OS provided defaults.

A mismash of bugs and workarounds causes the copy buffer (X selection) to get wiped some of the time in my recent desktop environment. And that in a seemingly unpredictable manner. The following bug is mostly in play: GNOME VTE soft reset wipes selection That bug causes: reset(1) to wipe the middle-mouse (primary) buffer (although this differs per system — could not put my finger on this); reset(1) to wipe the clipboard buffer, but only if the reset was called from window that originated the current clipboard buffer contents; GNU screen(1) initialization to misbehave as reset does, as described above — even through an ssh session — by wiping the buffer, if TERM=xterm-256color.

Today we ran into a dovecot/imap crash on a Xenial box. The Dovecot in question was the patched dovecot-2.2.22. Due to an as of yet unexplained cause, reading mail through Thunderbird mail client worked fine, but when opening a message with Roundcube (webmail), most messages would give an odd error about a “message that could not be opened”. An IMAP trace of Roundcube revealed that the IMAP server stopped responding after the client A0004 UID FETCH command.

Information regarding Meltdown and Spectre attacks. Current state Waiting for software patch availability. Patched ubuntu kernels are available for testing. Updates: 20180104: Created blogpost 20180105: Added new information/links 20180105: Status update 20180108: Added information from Redhat about performance impact from patches. 20180108: Updated links list. 20180108: Status update Links https://spectreattack.com / https://meltdownattack.com (same site) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and-spectre-every-modern-processor-has-unfixable-security-flaws/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and-spectre-heres-what-intel-apple-microsoft-others-are-doing-about-it/ https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulnerable-to-spectre-or-meltdown/ High level description CVE’s Spectre - CVE-2017-5715 Spectre - CVE-2017-5753 Meltdown - CVE-2017-5754 As described on: https://spectreattack.

2017 ISO27001 certified + NEN7510 Ewout joined our team as an SRE More projects opensourced at github: https://github.com/ossobv Uradesign designed logo’s for several of our open source projects Started providing Kubernetes as a Service / Managed Kubernetes Lots of interesting stuff

Starting the 16th of December we are on leave. We return to the office on the 2nd of January. During this period we are available 24/7 for incident response and other urgent matters as usual. If you already know of any urgent requests which needs to be handled during this period, please inform us in advance so we can plan the required availability.

We used to use reprepro (4.17) to manage our package repository. However, it did not support serving multiple versions of the same package. The Benjamin Drung version from GitHub/profitbricks/reprepro does. Here’s our recipe to build it. $ git clone -b 5.1.1-multiple-versions https://github.com/profitbricks/reprepro.git $ cd reprepro It lacks a couple of tags, so we’ll add some lightweight ones. $ git tag 4.17.1 2d93fa35dd917077e9248c7e564648da3a5f1fe3 && git tag 4.17.1-1 0c9f0f44a84f67ee5f14bccf6507540d4f7f8e39 && git tag 5.

Maintenance network Mediacentrale On November 1st 2017 after 22:00 we will upgrade our network in the Mediacentrale. Due to roadworks around Julianaplein in Groningen that will impact our current connections, we will move our network traffic to an upgraded router and fiber path, thus minimizing downtime related to these roadworks. Furthermore, this maintenance also results in an upgrade in our capacity to the Mediacentrale, as we will upgrade from a 1G to 10G infrastructure.

How to get (semi)exact uptime values for processes? If you look at the ps faux listing, you’ll see a bunch of values: walter 27311 0.8 1.8 5904852 621728 ? SLl sep06 61:05 \_ /usr/lib/chromium-browser/... walter 27314 0.0 0.2 815508 80852 ? S sep06 0:00 | \_ /usr/lib/chromium-brow... walter 27316 0.0 0.0 815508 14132 ? S sep06 0:01 | | \_ /usr/lib/chromium-... That second value (27311) is the PID, the tenth (61:05) how much CPU time has been spent.

Do you use sudo for automated tasks? For instance to let the Zabbix agent access privileged information? Then your auth.log may look a bit flooded, like this: Aug 30 10:51:44 sudo: zabbix : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/sbin/iptables -S INPUT Aug 30 10:51:44 sudo: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0) Aug 30 10:51:44 sudo: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root Or, if you run periodic jobs by root from cron, you get this:

The PowerDNS nameserver pdnsutil utility has an add-record, but no remove-record. How can we remove records programmatically for many domains at once? Step one: make sure we can list all domains. For our PowerDNS 4 setup, we could do the following: $ list_all() { ( for type in master native; do pdnsutil list-all-zones $type; done ) | grep -vE '^.$|:' | sort -V; } $ list_all domain1.tld domain2.tld ... Step two: filter the domains where we want to remove anything.

One of our Asterisk telephony machines appeared to “leak” queue member agents. That is, refuse to ring them because they were supposedly busy. When trying to find the cause, there weren’t any data dumping functions for the container I wanted to inspect in the CLI. In this case the pending_members which is of type struct ao2_container. So, we had to resort to using gdb to inspect the data. The struct ao2_container container data type itself looks like this:

Today I got one of these Letsencrypt Expiry mails again. It looks like this: Your certificate (or certificates) for the names listed below will expire in 19 days (on 21 Jun 17 19:38 +0000). Please make sure to renew your certificate before then, or visitors to your website will encounter errors. [domain here] ... If you want to stop receiving all email from this address, click [link here] (Warning: this is a one-click action that cannot be undone) I don’t need this particular domain anymore.

Every once in a while I have to deal with machines provisioned by puppet. I can’t seem to get used to the fact that --test not only tests, but actually does. It displays what it does though output, which is nice. To test without applying, you need the --noop flag. But, today I wanted to bring up the quick fix to this old warning/error: Error: Facter: error while resolving custom fact "pip_version": undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass The cause of the issue is an old version of pip(1) which has no --version parameter.

Ever since I updated from Ubuntu/Yakkety to Zesty, my apt-get(1) would sit and wait a while before doing actual work: $ sudo apt-get update 0% [Working] Madness. Let’s see what it’s doing… $ sudo strace -f -s 512 apt-get update ... [pid 5603] connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1")}, 16) = 0 ... [pid 5603] sendto(3, "\1\271\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\5_http\4_tcp\3ppa\tlaunchpad\3net\0\0!\0\1", 46, MSG_NOSIGNAL, NULL, 0) = 46 [pid 5603] poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}], 1, 5000 <unfinished ...> ... [pid 5600] select(8, [5 6 7], [], NULL, {0, 500000}) = 0 (Timeout) .

You may have an internal project that you wish to open source. When starting the project, you didn’t take that into account, so it’s likely to contain references to private data that you do not wish to share. Step one would be to clean things up. If this is a slow process, this can take time, while in the mean time the project gets updates. Now, at one point you’re confident that at commit X1000, the project contains only non-private data.

In the night of Wednesday (22nd of Febr. 2017) to Thursday (23rd of Febr. 2017) between 23:45 and 03:00 we will perform maintenance on our loadbalancers. ####Maintenance window 22-02-2017 23:45 - 23-02-2017 03:00 ####Description Loadbalancers will be upgraded to increase throughput and enable new capabilities. ####Impact When maintenance starts, we’ll reroute all traffic to the secondary loadbalancer. Customers that have a multi-site setup should therefore not have any service interruption.

In Look before you paste from a website to terminal the author rightly warns us about carelessly pasting any input from a web page into the terminal. This LookBeforePaste Chrome Extension is a quick attempt at trying to warn the user. Example output when pressing CTRL-C on the malicious code: Heuristics are defined as follows. They could certainly be improved, but it’s a start. function isSuspicious(node) { if (node.nodeType == node.

If you find yourself in the situation that you have to reuse your Letsencrypt credentials/account generated by Dehydrated (a bash Letsencrypt interface) with the official Certbot client, like me, you’ll want to convert your config files. In my case, I wanted to change my e-mail address, and the Dehydrated client offered no such command. With Certbot you can do this: $ certbot register --update-registration --account f65c... But you’ll need your credentials in a format that Certbot groks.

Can I use the MySQL function characteristic DETERMINISTIC in combination with READS SQL DATA and do I want to? TL;DR If the following two groups of statements are the same to you, you want the DETERMINISTIC characteristic on your FUNCTION, even if you have READS SQL DATA. SET @id = (SELECT my_func()); SELECT * FROM my_large_table WHERE id = @id; -- versus SELECT * FROM my_large_table WHERE id = my_func(); (All of this is tested with MySQL 5.

Starting the 17th of December we are on leave. We return to the office on the 2nd of January. During this period we are available 24/7 for incident response and other urgent matters as usual. If you already know of any urgent requests which needs to be handled during this period, please inform us in advance so we can plan the required availability.

Last month, our e-mail exchange (Postfix) started having trouble delivering mail to certain destinations. These destinations all appeared to be using Microsoft Office 365 for their e-mail. What was wrong? Who was to blame? And how to fix it? The problem appeared like this: Nov 16 17:04:08 mail postfix/smtp[13330]: warning: no MX host for umcg.nl has a valid address record Nov 16 17:04:08 mail postfix/smtp[13330]: 1D1D21422C2: to=<-EMAIL-@umcg.nl>, relay=none, delay=2257, delays=2256/0.02/0.52/0, dsn=4.

At times, Dovecot started spewing messages into dovecot.log about a corrupted index cache file because of “Broken MIME parts”. This happened on Ubuntu/Xenial with dovecot_2.2.22-1ubuntu2.2: imap: Error: Corrupted index cache file dovecot.index.cache: Broken MIME parts for mail UID 33928 in mailbox INBOX: Cached MIME parts don't match message during parsing: Cached header size mismatch (parts=4100...) imap: Error: unlink(dovecot.index.cache) failed: No such file or directory (in mail-cache.c:28) imap: Error: Corrupted index cache file dovecot.

While debugging a problem with EDNS records, I wanted to get some cache info from the PowerDNS pdns-recursor. rec_control dump-cache should supply it, but I did not see it. # rec_control dump-cache out.txt Error opening dump file for writing: Permission denied Doh, it’s running as the pdns user. Let’s write in /tmp. # rec_control dump-cache /tmp/out.txt dumped 42053 records # less /tmp/out.txt /tmp/out.txt: No such file or directory Wait what? No files?